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The automotive industry has always strived to make driving more enjoyable and safer. Therefore different approaches were developed. Beside passive safety concepts the vehicular industry uses active concepts to increase the vehicular safety. Based on the latest development, it can be seen that the trend is leading to more and more electronic supporters in the vehicle. Vulnerable road users like pedestrian and cyclists currently only passively participate in this new digital traffic. In the current work, we examine to which extend the traffic related communication process can be extended to vulnerable road users outside the vehicular field of vision using mobile devices. Therefore we determine user and technological requirements for realizing the communication process. Based on the raised requirements we developed a concept for a cooperative collision avoidance deploying device-to-device communication. Thereafter the concept is implemented into a prototype using a peer-to-peer architecture based on the Wi-Fi Direct standard. Finally we report on the evaluation of our prototype in real world scenarios. The results show the general ability of smartphones being used for cooperative collision avoidance. While the Wi-Fi Direct standard revealed some crucial issues while being used for this purposes.